Cat Power (35 page)

When the recording sessions for Campbell's string arrangements took place, Chan came down to L.A. to hang out even though her vocals were already done. “We did it at the Boat,” Campbell remembers, “which is this really cool studio in Silver Lake owned by the Dust Brothers. It used to be a gospel radio station in the thirties, and they built this little building that somehow looks like a ship—it has a little porthole, it has a little bridge on the front.” The atmosphere in the studio was loose but businesslike. “In the world of recording albums, string sessions tend to be a bit more staid—there's no groupies or strippers,” Campbell jokes. “But there was a little bit of drinking going on. It was a good vibe.”

Dave Grohl played drums on a few songs on
You Are Free
. “Shaking Paper” is a dense track made foreboding by the relentlessness of Grohl's lulling snare work. Chan has called the song her “favorite with drums” off the album. “When my friend”—Chan refused to refer to either Vedder or Grohl by name in interviews about the album— “was playing, I got to get exactly what I heard in my head,” she said. “It was really kind of physically painful for him to do. It is the same thing for four minutes—I felt guilty for it but I'm so happy, because he was doing exactly what I heard.”

The most atypical track on
You Are Free
is “Free,” a rollicking, almost-pop song that features the lyric “Don't be in love with the autograph” and counts as Cat Power's first overtly antifame tune. “It's like ‘Kill your idols,’” Chan has said of the song's meaning. “Enjoy what you have yourself and what you can create. You don't have to look at a television, just… grass roots. Look around, enjoy art. Look to what you have, 'cause things look differently if you look at them all long enough. Just forget what you're supposed to know.”

The fan and critical reaction to
You Are Free
was generally positive, but after the recording sessions were over, Chan was left with serious reservations about whether or not stepping outside of her comfort zone, working with other musicians, and building her songs out beyond their original spare formula was a good idea. In her head, most of her songs sound and should sound as basic as possible, and any attempt at elaboration obscured their meaning. “I liked ‘Free’ better when there's nothing on it but
the guitar
,” Chan has said. She feels the same way about “He War,” which she wrote before
The Covers Record
came out, and which was about her then boyfriend Daniel Currie. “It sounds so different now, which I don't like,” Chan has said of the version included on
You Are Free
. “I hate that. It doesn't sound the way it used to sound because I hadn't played it in so long, but I knew if I didn't put ‘He War’ out, it would never come out.”

This conflict—between wanting to grow as a musician and use the studio tools at her disposal versus feeling fundamentally most comfortable with spare, simple production—has been raging in Chan's mind since the beginning of her career. Some part of her will always be most at home playing an acoustic guitar barefoot in her Cabbagetown backyard for an audience of none, because even though she's grown to like some aspects of it, she genuinely never really believed making music
would be her life. “There's a certain energy some songs have to me, but there's some I don't want to touch with a ten-foot pole,” Chan has said. “That's how I felt about some songs that were recorded with a band. It was always improv—I didn't want to practice because I was really shy about playing with other people. I kind of got manipulated into doing it. I feel like I murdered some of the songs by having a band on them.”

In spite of all this, Chan has acknowledged that some of her collaborations on
You Are Free
worked out well. “One of the guys in the studio put the piano for ‘Evolution’ into a chamber,” the singer remembered. “It makes the sound tremble, rather than a reverb or an echo. It's like a shaking sound. That we kept on the record. The tamborino on ‘Baby Doll’ —the tamborino guy was just practicing at the beginning of the song. ‘Well, maybe we should just not put it in the song and leave it on the record as an intro,’
we thought
. That was definitely not what it was supposed to be.”

If following up
Moon Pix
with a mellow album filled with other people's songs and a tour spent onstage in the dark wasn't enough of a declaration against fame, Chan's reaction to the press surrounding
You Are Free
made obvious her intense hatred of celebrity. Kasper's presence on
You Are Free
already drew a new level of attention to the record, but when word got out that both Eddie Vedder and Dave Grohl would appear on the album, that's all the journalists, critics, and fans wanted to talk to her about. Chan enjoyed working with these men, but she resented the attention it brought to the album; it reinforced her initial wariness about inviting anyone new into the Cat Power realm. “You think, ‘Oh, he's your friend,’” Chan has said of Kasper, “but you don't want that to be the projection of the interview, the projection of the record, the projection of the magazine or the label in the bio. You don't want that to be a fucking part of it, because it's so manipulative!”

The more interviews she did to promote the record, the more questions she was asked about her famous collaborators, the more irate Chan became that anyone cared. “This publicity machine, it makes me sick,” she has raged. “They need a name. I just wanna get away from that. I don't want those things to be talked about at all.” The entire experience of working with famous musicians reminded Chan of the way she initially perceived the music business when her father was chasing rock stardom with the Brick Wall. Fame, money, power: All of it struck Chan then as grotesque and cheap, everything that made her want to avoid the music business in the first place.

As justifiably marginalized as it made Chan feel to have so much attention placed on two guys who barely played on her album, her outrage could also be viewed as astounding naïveté or, if one were given to cynicism, false protestation. After all, no one forced her to recruit two of the most famous musicians in rock, with tens of millions of albums sold between them, to appear on her record. Chan is, by many accounts, very willful. She doesn't get bossed around easily, and by this time, ten years into her career, she knew how to handle herself. Chan must have expected that she would be fielding lots of questions about Vedder and Grohl, but pretended that she could control the tenor of the press response to suit her I'm-just-playing-with-my pals spin on the album and avoid the hype that superstar collaborations inevitably invite.

The public response to You Are Free was astounding. Fans who pledged their allegiance to the cult of Chan after hearing Moon Pix remained fascinated by Cat Power four and a half years later, and in that interim the singer had also
established an entirely new, entirely mainstream fan base thanks to
The Covers Record
. Both groups of fans—the original Cat Power obsessives, and the new, soccer-mom-and-dad, NPR-listening yuppie contingent— were all super-primed for a new album.

“It's interesting to talk to people outside of New York once she started touring,” Charles Aaron recalls. “People genuinely saw something in her without all this New York mystique and mystery and bullshit. Like, my wife sort of liked Cat Power from
You Are Free
—that's the album where I felt like this is a real artist. The song ‘You Are Free’ is a song I would put on a mix tape for years and years and years.”

You Are Free
was released on February 18, 2003. The reviews were largely positive. Reviewing for
Rolling Stone
, Kelefa Sanneh called the album Chan's “most beautiful” and remarked on the evolution of song-writing revealed within its fourteen tracks. “There are gaunt rock songs and ramshackle ballads,” Sanneh wrote, “all painted with bold, sure strokes that belie her ambivalence.” Online music magazine Pitchfork gave the album an 8.9 out of ten, praising the first half for its “stunning variety and intrigue,” while suggesting that the track list could have used some editing: “As the old adage goes, ten songs is an album, and in this case, fourteen is a few too many.” Greil Marcus, who has made it clear that he prefers Chan's covers to her original compositions, was nonetheless impressed by what he heard. “I like
You Are Free
enormously,” he says. “It's completely alive and ambitious and expansive. It lives up to the title. I think of it as this little drama where a person is trying to convince herself that, yes, she
is
free.”

As the first album of the post
-Covers
era,
You Are Free
was all but universally hailed as something different and unexpected from an artist whom many assumed had already released her best material. “Honestly, by the time
You Are Free
came out, I was surprised it was that good,”
Aaron says. “I really liked it. I took the time out to listen to it because I felt like she was a whole different person in a way. I didn't connect with that other person, who was kind of like a performance artist.

“I don't know if the shows were great,” Aaron continues. “They were still totally all over the place. But I didn't feel like I was buying into some little novella, some little play that we all were gonna be in, some psychodrama being played out. Clearly she'd learned how to sing. She'd learned how to write songs. I had it on record. I never really had it in person.”